MORTON, Ill. — The wet spring that farmers endured didn’t just hamper corn and soybeans. Nestlé, which cans pumpkin puree and pumpkin pie filling under the Libby’s Pumpkin label, says its contract growers have had a difficult year.

"This year, we had quite a few pressure points, ranging from disease to flooding." operations manager Steve Buettel said late last month. As a result, Nestlé estimates it will receive only about half as many pumpkins as usual at its processing plant in central Illinois.

Since harvest began in late August, about a dozen semitrailers arrive each day at the plant carrying gourds from fields that were planted in the spring with its Libby’s Select seed. Most of those farms are within 50 miles of Morton, partly because transporting pumpkins longer distance adds too much to the cost but also because the company works closely with its growers on getting the crop ready, planting and crop care.

Usually, Libby’s harvesting crews work around the clock well into November, but they will run out of product to collect sooner this year.

"We had thought it would be one third less, but we’re now thinking more like half," Buettel said. The company won’t know for sure because its crews still will be harvesting for a few more weeks at the thousands of acres planted each year.

Other canneries also make and sell pumpkin puree – including a Seneca Foods operation in nearby Princeville, Ill., which supplies grocery stores’ private labels – but about eight of every 10 cans of pumpkin on grocery shelves come from the Libby’s plant in Morton. So when central Illinois has an occasional weak pumpkin crop, it has nationwide ramifications.

"We are confident that, taking in factors like existing inventory, consumers will have enough pumpkin in the stores for their needs this season," Buettel said. The downside is that finding cans of pumpkin on store shelves may be tricky in 2016.

"Once we ship the remainder of the 2015 harvest (most likely by mid-November), we’ll have no more Libby’s Pumpkin to sell until harvest 2016," the company said.

The primary cause of this shortage is record or near-record rainfall that fell this summer. Central Illinois received about 9 inches in June (average precipitation is less than 4.5 inches), and 18 inches fell overall in summer months, making it the fourth wettest on record, according the National Weather Service.

"Due to the rain, the pumpkins didn’t grow like they should," said Jeannette Abel, who had 43 acres under contract to Nestlé this year on her farm near Deer Creek. "My yields were 15 tons compared to 25 to 28 tons. The pumpkins were small this year due to the amount of rain."

She said the rain didn’t delay planting, but that wasn’t the case for Morton’s John Ackerman, who staggered his planting last year – doing seven plantings in about three weeks – to spread out his harvest. This year, he got interrupted after three plantings.

"We had way too much rain in June," he said. "On one hand, it delayed planting; on the other hand, it wasn’t ideal for the crop."

Ackerman, who often is a contract grower for the Libby’s Pumpkin crop, also grows many varieties of ornamental pumpkins to sell in the fall.

All cucurbits – the family of gourds that includes squash, pumpkin, zucchini, melons and watermelon – are finicky crops to grow.

"They’re a vining plant, so they don’t like wet feet," Ackerman said.

The more traditional orange pumpkins used for carving jack-o’-lanterns also suffered this year.

This year was an almost total washout for Nick Roth, who plants nearly 3 acres in pumpkins each year on his 150 acres near Morton, Ill. "It’s the rain. We plant at end of May, and they got pounded in June with rain," Roth said.

Pumpkin sizes also were smaller this year for Roth. He says store prices are higher as a result, maybe as much as $1.50 more than last year.

"We don’t retail a ton of them (he sells sweet corn and other vegetables he grows at a produce stand in the city of Morton), but we do wholesale some to one or two small markets. For one of those customers, we usually get him 1,000; he didn’t get any (from me) this year."

The hilly terrain in southern Illinois and Indiana and western Kentucky usually works well for pumpkins because it’s less likely the gourds will sit in standing water. That didn’t help much in 2015. "This year has been quite a challenging year because we’ve actually been more on the wet side; and therefore, we had a lot of battles to fight with various diseases, various types of nutrient problems because of the excess rain, and so forth," said Wayne "Ren" Sirles, vice president of Rendleman Orchards in southern Illinois.

Known mostly for the abundance of their peaches and apples each season, Rendleman’s operation also usually produces a sizeable crop of pumpkins each year, save for this season.

"I think … our production on pumpkins is going to be down somewhere around 25 percent to probably 40 percent compared to previous years."

The orchard opened its pumpkin patch Oct. 1, and despite the yield drop, Sirles believes he’ll have enough of a supply for most customers this year.